IBM Wild Ducks: Episode 1: Transforming Food Safety with … · It’s a few days into the new year and I’m standing in a bustling crowd at one of ... and explain a ground-breaking

IBM Wild Ducks: Episode 1: Transforming Food Safety with Data.

January 27 2015 1

It’s a few days into the new year and I’m standing in a bustling crowd at one of

California’s largest farmers markets.

Not long ago markets like this one were the primary source of fresh food for a

community—and everything was seasonal and local.

In the summer, it was gorgeous blueberries, plump strawberries, sweet corn and

vine-ripened tomatoes. In winter, you got Brussels sprouts and turnips.

But thanks to an increasingly national and even global food supply chain, you can

now buy almost anything year-round.

According to the USDA, since 1999, we’ve tripled the amount of fresh fruits and

vegetables that we bring into the US every year.

Which is great news for a morning smoothie habit — but it also poses new

dangers to your well-being. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you know

exactly what I’m talking about.

Deadly outbreaks of salmonella in the cilantro. E.coli in the bean sprouts. Listeria

in apples and peaches. If it seems like these outbreaks are happening more

often, it’s not your imagination.

But you know what? Talking about this stuff out here is like yelling fire in a

theater.

I’m gonna move inside so I can safely discuss this disturbing trend – and explain

a ground-breaking idea about how to fight it.

It’s an entirely new approach to food safety at a time when deadly bacteria are

infecting more and more of us. If you value your health, you’ll want to listen

closely.


January 27 2015 2

--

Welcome to the premier episode of Wild Ducks, a podcast series brought to you

by IBM and produced by a small team of journalists. I’m Jeffrey O’Brien.

Our name is inspired by Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM’s former Chairman. He once

famously said that he wanted IBM to be full of Wild Ducks.

He was referring to a parable written by the Danish philosopher Kierkegard. My

simplest interpretation goes like this.

Wild ducks are always on the move. Scouting. Exploring. Never satisfied. They’re

the creative ones, the problem solvers.

We’ve been spending a lot of time lately with wild ducks. And in the coming

months, we’ll be telling their stories, demonstrating how a combination of

curiosity, ambition and technology can change the world.

Today’s wild duck is Dave Crean. He’s the vice president of corporate R&D at

Mars and he’s on the team that’s behind a groundbreaking initiative being

developed with IBM.

They call it “Sequencing the Food Supply Chain.”

It’s a brand new experiment that pairs the latest thinking in epidemiology and

microbiology with the tools of genomics and big data.

Now we’ve all heard about mapping the human genome or the genomes of

various animals and crops. These are huge scientific undertakings with the

potential to help us understand and even solve any number of health and

environmental issues.


January 27 2015 3

But Crean’s ambition is in some ways even grander.

He wants to map every last life form that inhabits the world’s farms and factories.

In his mind, that’s what it’s gonna take to actually stop our food from harming us.

With almost 30 years in food safety management, Crean understands as well as

anyone that today’s best efforts are just not good enough.

He’s based in Virginia, but travels the world constantly, speaking at the UN and

the WHO, collaborating with fellow scientists, and touring factories and farms.

I caught up with him a few times while reporting this story and he was passionate

both about the scope of the problem and the food industry’s responsibility to

tackle it.

Have a listen while he explains the effects of food borne bacteria—not only on

our health but also on the global economy.

“There was a great piece of work in 2011 that was done by CDC that estimated

that 50 million Americans a year have a food-related illness. That there are 3000

deaths and that costs about $80 billion. It’s thought that in Africa, 2000 people

die each day from food-safety related illnesses and the cost is about $4b each

year just in post-harvest grain losses, which could feed about 48 million people

each year. And I think businesses are at risk. You know, if something goes

wrong, it used to go wrong in one country and one place and you were able to fix

it. Now if it goes wrong, it's a global incident and it challenges people's

confidence in that business, in that brand, or in the industry generally.

The good news is that Crean is convinced that a new set of tools at our disposal

make it possible – for the first time in history – to face this problem in an entirely

new way.


January 27 2015 4

Rather than merely testing for bacteria the way we’ve done for decades, we can

now view the entire food supply as a whole by analyzing billions or even trillions

of life forms.

Which could move us from an era of pathogen prevention to something that’s

closer to actual prediction.

--

Mars has more than a hundred factories around the world and dozens of

recognizable brands including M&Ms, Uncle Ben’s, Altoids and Pedigree.

It’s a global food juggernaut that works with thousands of suppliers and millions

of tons of raw materials every year.

Of course food safety has always been important to the company. You might say

it’s table stakes in this industry. For the longest time, the approach has boiled

down to this:

Coach suppliers about how to maintain safe conditions.

Constantly test and monitor ingredients and materials.

And keep everything as clean as possible

But Crean has come to think that the current paradigm, and its heavy reliance on

testing, has taken us about as far as it can.

So he’s looking at the bigger picture. Which is what makes him a wild duck.

Rather than testing for what we know about, he’s intent on exploring the

unknown.


January 27 2015 5

Using the latest scientific research and technology, he wants what he calls a

‘surveillance’ system .

And the company is embraced this wild duck. Mars is beginning to roll out a pilot

of that system in their Petcare facility in Reno, Nevada.

Wait – pet food?

Why start there when human lives are at stake? Right. Well, it might not seem

intuitive, but to hear Crean tell it, ensuring the safety of dog food is one of the

hardest things that Mars does.

“So we’re taking human grade materials and we take the bits that people don’t

want.... It actually gives us a bigger challenge from a safety point of view. Not

that it’s a different standard, but just because it’s harder to do. That’s why it’s a

great place to think about the challenge of making food safer.

In other words, if we can tackle this problem in pet food, human food should be a

comparative snap.

So I pack up the car and head from the San Francisco Bay area to Reno to see

some of the challenges that come in trying to keep a factory free of bacteria.

--

Let me paint the scene. 20 minutes east of the downtown casinos along

interstate 80, I’m standing in a parking lot alongside the Truckee River. Parched

rocky hills frame the landscape.

The enormous building that houses Mars Petcare is painted tan, as if to be

camouflaged by the desert. But with its rooftop silos and an over-sized American

flag, there’s no missing it.


January 27 2015 6

I’m greeted by Annette Miller, the company’s North American director of quality

and food safety. She actually helped Mars build this factory 18 years ago.

Before we get to how the company is working with IBM, it’s important to

understand a bit about how the status quo safety process works.

Annette provides a quick education in what’s known as Hazard Analysis Critical

Control Points - or “Hassup” for short.

Food manufacturers all rely on their suppliers to control the farm environments,

and of course they watch them closely and teach them best practices.

Once the ingredients make it into the factory, they’re heated to north of 200

degrees in what’s known as the kill step. Then comes a never-ending series

microbiological tests.

I ask Annette how much cost and complexity this adds to the manufacturing.

“The whole thing costs a lot of money because you have testing from a

microbiological lab, you have all that monitoring. You have all the sanitation in

order to manage that. And you’ve got the inventory being held on not being used

until you feel confident that it’s a safe product.”

After some safety instructions, we put on hard hats and steel-toe shoes and

venture into the factory. You can see pictures of the machinery -- and what it’s

like to make the pet food -- at ibm.com/wildducks

We start at the end of the line, where the bags are sewed and put on pallets.

Mars inspects the ingredients and final product all throughout the line — not just

for bacteria but for anything that shouldn’t be there, like metal.


January 27 2015 7

The company had a recall this summer when metal fragments showed up in 55

bags of Pedigree.

That product wasn’t from Reno, but Mars was able to track the issue back to the

manufacturing line and even determine which ingredients were used, thanks to

special codes stamped on every bag.

Even in winter, the factory feels very hot and in places it smells like pretty much

like you might think it would.

But you might not expect it to be so clean. Massive machines run 24 hours a day,

5 days a week and they’re dismantled and scrubbed every single weekend.

Disinfection is considered key to stopping bacterial spread.

And then there’s the testing. Mars alone spends millions every year testing

mainly for salmonella, listeria, and e. coli. And the results are almost always

negative.

But Crean is still frustrated. That’s primarily because he’s not learning much

about how to do a better job.

A negative test result says nothing about whether a pathogen will appear at a

later date – much less whether it might be living in a spot that was missed.

And so a manufacturer’s best recourse is to just test, test, and test.

“If I take, you know, 300 samples for every single delivery, it would tell me I have

a 95% probability that no more than 1% is contaminated. But 1% is a lot! If you

think about it. And 300 is a lot in terms of processing samples. And oh by the

way, those statistics are misleading. It’s based on the idea that there’s a random

distribution, that there’s an equal chance that each place contains salmonella.

We know salmonella and other pathogens don’t behave that way. They tend to


January 27 2015 8

be in clumps. So, you’re literally looking for a needle in the haystack. You can’t

do it by testing. It’s not a reliable method.

Seeing the status quo process up close makes me think it’s really based on what

you might call small data. At its best, it’s reactive and preventive.

Crean wants something more all-encompassing, a predictive system that

understands the root causes of contamination —so the industry can stamp out

those conditions and stop the spread of disease.

Such a system requires a new set of tools, which is why he went to IBM.

“Is salmonella present in a factory environment simply because it found its way

there on some dust? Or is it present because it’s got some resistance factors that

have been given it to by some other organism that the testing we do today

doesn’t detect? We’re hoping that by going to genomics, and it’s something of a

big data challenge as well, by managing all that data and looking for how the

data relates to what we see the factories, that we’ll be able to get a very different

story about how organisms, why they're present, how’re they’re controlled, why

they thrive, and answer some of the questions that we're not able to answer

today. Now obviously there’s a huge amount of data and this is not my specific

area of competence. This is really where the guys from IBM come into their own.

So we’re going to have to pull together a lot of different disciplines so we can get

a better look at this picture.”

To get under the hood of the new system, I head to IBM’s Almaden research

facility in San Jose, California.

I meet with a few of the researchers including James Kaufman, a scientist and

one of the key figures in this partnership. He explains that Mars and IBM are

following a path that’s being charted by modern medicine.

Listen to how he compares a factory to the human body.


January 27 2015 9

“The primary life form on this planet is bacteria. There are more bacteria cells on

the surface of your body than there are human cells and what is normal? This is

state of the art in microbiology and even medicine. They’re trying to understand

what’s the normal human microbiome. What do you expect to find in a healthy

person? If somebody has a disease, how does it change? Is it a cause of the

disease or is it caused by the disease, right? The same is true for a trainload of

um, cornmeal or milk powder or anything else. There’s bacteria in it and it’s

perfectly normal under normal circumstances. So the first step in the scientific

study is to understand the normal and then to study how that normal responds to

changes that might make the ingredient unsafe.”

Establishing what’s normal in a factory microbiome would be a huge step

because it would overcome one of the biggest failings of microbiological testing.

Today, it’s only possible to test for what we’re aware of. This helps prevent

salmonella contamination, for example, but it does nothing to stop new

contaminants.

Remember when melamine found its way into baby formula in a Chinese factory

a few years ago? Melamine is an industrial chemical. It’s used in concrete and

plastics. It has no place in baby formula. But of course no one was testing for it –

why would they? - so it just slipped by.

If we know what’s normal in a factory, then whenever anything unusual

appears—whether it’s salmonella or melamine or something we’ve never

encountered—it’ll sound an alarm.

Here’s Crean again

Being able to trace them forensically by using new genomic techniques is

going to minimize risks. Minimize risks to public health and minimize risks to

industry. I think what we’re talking about here is going to deliver that


January 27 2015 10

capability. The application of genomics, the application of big data, using

networks like we’ve never used them before, thinking about food safety as

being pre-competitive and sharing that data and making it open where we

can, that's what is going to deliver the new tools that’s going to prevent those

massive kind of issues from hitting us in the future.

So where do things go from here? This project is still in the early pilot stage, but it

has enthusiastic backers in both Mars and IBM.

In the next six months, the teams will be gathering samples and shipping them

away for testing almost per usual. But these samples will undergo DNA and RNA

sequencing, generating terabytes and terabytes of data.

It’ll take hundreds of thousands of samples to begin to understand the

relationships among billions of life forms.

But IBM is bringing the computational horsepower and the researchers are

custom coding software to speed the process.

Everyone involved fully expects to reveal some surprises along the way. For

example, today, Mars relies heavily on cleaning—but what if disinfection isn’t the

wisest course of action?

Maybe we’d all be better off if factories and farms worked harder to encourage

the presence of natural enemies to salmonella.

With a smarter food safety system that understands how and why bacteria

spreads, we’re sure to discover new alternatives.

--


January 27 2015 11

The IBM researchers I spoke with imagine this system existing as a service that

all food manufacturers can subscribe to, and Mars is all for it.

Crean says this isn’t a competitive play for the company. The aim is to help find

ways to better manage food safety risk on a global scale, which will keep you and

your family safe.

A safer food supply will benefit all of humanity, and that’s the reason Mars is

making the investment.

“You know, you can take this challenge and see it in the context of business or in

the context of the world and actually it’s not much of a leap from one to the other.

That’s really exciting because what we’re developing now for our business has

absolute applicability to the world. When I talk to senior management, they’re

delighted to improve the business, but they’re also very interested and excited by

being able to make a contribution to food security globally.”

Having witnessed the complexity of dog food manufacturing up close, I can say

the type of systemic overhaul Crean wants is a daunting proposition.

But he’s facing it head on. Like a wild duck.

“And you know, maybe we are being overly ambitious. And it’s a very high-risk

project. And we’ve highlighted that all the way through. But ya know, if you don’t

give it a go, if you don’t kick the ball, you’re never going to score a goal. So, and

we absolutely believe it’s a ball worth kicking.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what I call Wild Duck thinking.

And that wraps up our premier episode. You can read a Q&A with Dave Crean and

see photos and an infographic about the world’s deadliest food born pathogens

ibm.com/wildducks.


January 27 2015 12

You can subscribe to future episodes there or wherever you get your podcasts.

We’re on Twitter @IBMWildDucks, and using the hashtags #IBMWildDucks and

#FoodInnovation.

I’d like to thank the Mars Petcare team in Reno for their help, patience and hospitality

and of course Dave Crean. And thank you for listening. I’m Jeffrey O’Brien. I hope you

join us for the next episode of Wild Ducks.

Documents

IBM Wild Ducks: Episode 1: Transforming Food Safety with … · It’s a few days into the new year and I’m standing in a bustling crowd at one of ... and explain a ground-breaking